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There's no such thing as "the market", there are market segments that abstractly represent groups of people with similar characteristics. Charging different prices to people in different segments is standard business practice. Burger chains could charge wealthy individuals $100k per burger if they wanted to, just, burger chains usually have difficulty distinguishing the truly wealthy individuals who walk in the door who would have no trouble putting down that kind of money for a burger.

.... which, in the day and age of facial recognition, gives me an idea for a startup.



Burger chains have at least gotten a start on differentiating their pricing - by raising prices dramatically across the board, and telling anyone who’s frugal or just broke that they can only get discounts (to bring prices slightly lower than today’s pricing, but still a lot more than before) if they use the app. Upper-class people don’t bother with it and pay full price, frugal people take the time to figure out the cheapest way to use one of the current “offers” to assemble a meal.


Upper class people don't bother with it because we all know those discounts are temporary but they'll never let go of the data they extract from those apps and will try to spam you


One can always use a fake email and login account. Upper class people don't bother because they don't eat at fast food chains as often enough as lower class people to warrant needing an app for each one; 99.9% don't give a shit about data collection, only people on HN and other technical fora do.


>One can always use a fake email and login account.

When you're using that fake email be sure to have a burner phone or public internet so they can't link it to your IP, also don't use your computer or any computer you've logged in on so that browser fingerprinting doesn't tag you, also turn off your GPS so they can't geo correlate you.

Of course the rich person is in the same boat, their geolocation will log that they went to Burger King, or their credit card company will snitch on them. Okay, fine, pay with cash, cover your phone in a tin foil faraday cage. Now you also will need to drive a 30 year old car to said establishment since the car manufacturer put a cellular modem and GPS in your car and sells the fact that you went to Burger King to the highest bidder.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there are dozens of other ways people are tagged. At some level may as well either use the app or just not go.


Yep, that's why it's usually not worth it trying to pretend one has online privacy.




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